01/03/2020
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.- John Muir
When I was a kid, my junior high was notoriously out of control. Fights were common. I still have pencil lead stuck in my left shoulder from being stabbed through my shirt. One day I was in the cafeteria walking toward the vending machines, likely on the hunt for a Snickers bar (It satisfies). A kid, a little bit smaller than me, placed a full carton of milk on the ground and stomped on it like he was trying to kickstart a motorcycle. The left half of my body received the full liquid impact, wetting me from head to toe. Naturally, I reacted with instant ire and turned to him to exact punishment. As I approached, this kid went crazy. He rushed me, got up in my face and he shook like a raving lunatic. He still haunts me at night.
In hindsight I could have pummeled this kid. Maybe I should have. But I didn’t. I tucked my head and walked away probably mumbling, “Thank you for splashing milk on me.” I learned an important lesson that day. Unpredictability is the secret ingredient if you are ever in a fight. I tell my kids to use this all the time as a form of diplomacy if they are ever bullied or in danger.
Turn back time nearly 150 years ago. One sunny day, John Muir, the subject of this tribute, approached an open meadow and came face to face with a bear. Instead of doing what we all would think to do and walk away, he charged it like a raving lunatic. Why? Because he wanted to know what would happen. He was curious. Like me in the cafeteria, the bear, scared out of its mind, turned and ran for safety at the site of this scrawny mountain man lunatic. Why? Because bears don’t like crazy either.
We need a little crazy sometimes to get our attention. John Muir was his own endearing brand of crazy. He wasn’t the “tie yourself to a tree” type of crazy. He was the kind of mad scientist that loved the wild so much he almost withered away when he was away from it. He once climbed to the top of an extremely tall tree during an intense storm so he could know what it felt like to be a tree and be pummeled by the elements. When he was terribly sick on a visit to Alaska he laid his body on a glacier and claimed it healed him. His childlike curiosity blended with his almost biblical writing (he memorized the entire New Testament and ¾ of the Old Testament before he was 12) opened the minds of readers across the nation to a new way of thinking about their surroundings.
If you have ever been to a National Park you can thank John Muir. It was largely his words that sparked the entire world to view some of its most beautiful places as something to be preserved not harvested or sectioned off. Today over 4000 National Parks exist throughout the world and it all started with his pen. I rarely go into the wild without packing along some form of his writings. My personal favorite is a book called The Wilderness World of John Muir.
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